Mr. Obama should plan on spending Dec2016 in Monte Carlo. The entire month. Lease the casino. Invite all his Dem friends(for those pesky meetings and briefings, and so its a working vacation) and family and let the fedgov pay the entire tab. Then the Repubics can go ballistic with good reason.

President Barack Obama ordered Wednesday that his signature be affixed to legislation that averts the bulk of the so-called "fiscal cliff" and prevents federal income tax rates from rising on the vast majority of Americans, the White House said.

The official copy of the high-profile bill was signed at Obama's direction with an autopen, a device that places a facsimile of a person's signature on a document, a senior White House official told a pool reporter accompanying the president on the second leg of his winter break in Hawaii.

"We received the bill late this afternoon, and it was immediately processed. A copy was delivered to the President for review. He then directed the bill be signed by autopen," said the official, who was not further identified.

The White House statement announcing the signing was dated Wednesday, but arrived in the in-boxes of reporters via e-mail just after midnight Thursday morning Eastern time. The announcement notes that the bill also puts off for two months the so-called "sequester" of hundreds of billions of dollars in defense and domestic spending that was due to kick in at the start of the year and extends expiring unemployment benefits for another year, among other provisions.